


An Artistic Vision

by Alona



Category: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: F/F, Getting Together, Slight pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 13:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16198529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: Eugénie invites Louise to stay with her; Louise doesn't quite understand.





	An Artistic Vision

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oulfis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oulfis/gifts).



Two months after she had finished her schooling, Louise d'Armilly came to live in the Danglars household under the title of music teacher to the daughter of the house; she had been there only a day before she decided it had been a mistake to come.

No other choice had seemed possible. Eugénie had held Louise's hand in hers, dark eyes flashing with all and more than all of her usual force and conviction, and she had spoken of all they could accomplish if they were together – "always together, my dear, except when the tiresome demands of society force a brief parting on us."

Always together – Louise could not have refused that; there was nothing she wanted more.

During their first year together at the pension, she and Eugénie had hardly known each other – Eugénie was wealthy and had private masters come to the school to give extra lessons; Louise was poor and taught the younger girls to make up the fees her relatives could not pay. It was some magical chance, Louise thought, that had let the two of them meet during that second year, had let Louise catch Eugénie's attention with whatever poor talent she had.

"You would sound better if you were not so afraid," had been her first words spoken directly to Louise, when she had walked in on Louise practicing alone. "There is nothing to be afraid of, I assure you, for you have the most beautiful voice in this school, and your form is perfectly suited as a medium for it."

Louise had been flustered and had more sensed than understood the compliment. She had stammered out of a few words about not being afraid, and Eugénie had smiled at her with approval. From that moment they had been as near inseparable as the different orbits of their scholastic lives permitted.

"But Mlle Danglars has no friends," one of Louise's fellow boarders, a sometimes friend, had said, disapproving. "And how can you stand to be around someone so cold, so selfish?"

And the old music teacher, who was looking at Louise as a possible replacement when she retired, told her to try to suss out what this sudden interest from the daughter of a wealthy house could mean.

It was true that Eugénie had no other friends. She did not seem to want them. She was on comfortable terms with the teachers, except for the few who were men; there had been a terrible fight between her and the Latin master on account of something he had said to another of the great girls, and that Mlle Danglars had found unsuitable. The man had come close to losing his position over it, and afterwards he could never look at Eugénie directly when they chanced to pass each other by. For this display of nerve and others like it, and for her great beauty and acknowledged talent, Eugénie was as much admired as she was feared, especially among the younger girls, and when they were friends, Louise's little pupils were very much impressed that the queenly Mlle Danglars would come on purpose to their classroom to watch Mlle d'Armilly teach. Louise even believed that some of the remarks about their friendship were occasioned by jealousy. Louise had been chosen; they had not. She was frightened and proud at once of that, and only worried that the enchantment would someday come to an end as abruptly as it had begun.

In fact, though she little liked to think of it, Louise knew that the enchantment had a term on it: the end of their time at the pension. Eugénie would go home to a brilliant marriage and take up a high place in society, and Louise, if she worked very hard for many years, might one day have a school of her own to run. Their orbits, which had so briefly and sweetly coincided, would part forever.

Indeed so it appeared at first. Eugénie left, and Louise stayed on through the summer and early autumn, half on holiday, half helping with the light summer lessons as girls returned from visits to their families. Louise did not enjoy herself. The heat was oppressive, and her health, she believed, suffered for it. Eugénie sent almost daily letters, which exhaled her unbending personality, and which Louise kept under her pillow and pulled out at night to weep over, calling herself foolish as she did so. It gave her pain to read Eugénie's mocking accounts of the foibles of her parents and their circle of acquaintance, of the events passing in high society. She suffered even more from the repeated promises that they would see each other soon. Louise could not believe that, but still she whispered the promises to herself, not less often but more as time went on.

And then one day in October in place of a letter Eugénie came herself.

Louise received her in the teachers' parlor, had tea ready for her, insisted on pouring it herself. Her hand trembled as she did so, and Eugénie took her wrist to steady her.

"My dear," she said when the service was finished, "I shouldn't have left you so long. You're more pale and wilting than I've ever seen you. They're squeezing all the work they can get out of you here, and it's too bad of them. I should have come sooner."

"Oh, no, Eugénie," Louise protested. "Madame has been very lax. If I'm suffering from anything, it is from not having enough to do. You know I like to be doing things. And I have been a little lonely, perhaps, but I have had your letters to read to keep me company."

"I hope I'll be better company myself," Eugénie answered. "It's taken time, but I've convinced my parents that I must have a music teacher or I will give them no peace from now until Judgement Day. So you can come with me, as soon as we've finished tea, and the servants here will pack for you and send your things along."

"I... I don't understand."

"If you hold to a proper leave-taking I can come for you in the morning, but, really, Louise, I don't see any reason for you to spend one extra hour in these unworthy surroundings, and I'd prefer to take you away at once."

Louise had understood at once, in fact, or her heart had; but her mind had raised objections of propriety and of the impossibility of perfection on earth. It was just what she had wished for and dreamed of, and just what she could hardly accept was happening. That was when Eugénie pressed her hand and told her that they would be always together.

"Really, my dear, you're putting on the most delicate feminine airs about all this," Eugénie said, laughing. "It couldn't be more charming, but, finally, you must agree."

How many girls in history have resisted such an appeal? Louise, anyway, did not want to be one of them. She agreed. The tea, if the truth is to be told, was not even finished.

Obstacles did not exist for Eugénie, who was rich and confident and clear-headed. She summoned servants and dispatched them to pack Mlle d'Armilly's things and prepare them to be sent on to the Chausée d'Antin; she summoned Madame and explained how it was, and encouraged Louise to say a few parting words. Louise saw that Madame, a genteel but sharp-tongued little woman of fifty, was too stunned by all this activity to be more than slightly bemused. Louise took leave of a few other teachers, with Eugénie at her side, often holding her elbow and squeezing if the conversation dragged on too long. All told less than three hours had passed since they had sat down to tea before Louise found herself installed in a charming room in the Danglars mansion. It was no longer enchantment that Louise felt. She was dreaming the most beautiful and unbelievable dream, and when she closed her eyes to go to sleep in her new bed that night, she was afraid she would wake up and find it all gone.

The following night, once more alone in her bed, she no longer thought she was dreaming. All that had happened was real, and it had been a mistake.

It was not that Baron Danglars was odious, with his forced jolliness and his broad hints about what an excellent opportunity it was for Louise to be singled out by his daughter, when he understood she was utterly portionless herself; it was not the way Eugénie's mother was carefully, artificially polite to her, all the while trying to insinuate herself by her references to this or that irksome aspect of Eugénie's character into the middle of their friendship; it was not the way M. Debray watched Eugénie, which was the way all young men looked at pretty girls, modulated according to the fortune they knew the girls to have, or even the way he sat down beside Louise and murmured to her that he would be able to introduce her to patrons who would support her musical career as she merited; and again it was not the equivocal way the servants treated her, some well-meaning but uncertain of the position she was to occupy, some snubbing her and pointedly leaving tasks half-finished as though divining that Louise would never complain. All of this would have made her anxious and fretful, but it would not have convinced her that she should not have come.

The problem was still not Eugénie, imperious and scornful and brilliant in her own home as she had been at school; the problem was Louise herself.

She understood it that night.

At bedtime Eugénie called Louise into her room. She was sitting up in bed in her chemise and an open dressing gown, her mane of black hair loose around her shoulders. She moved aside and gestured for Louise to sit beside her. Louise, half-stifled by sudden emotion at this display of intimacy, climbed in. The sheets were warm where Eugénie had been sitting on them.

"How do you like it here, Louise?" she asked, laughing. "They're a pack of wild dogs, aren't they – my father the banker, the obnoxious M. Debray, even my mother – you don't have to lie and say you like them."

"How can you talk so, Eugénie? Have you never cared for your parents?"

"Not a bit, no more than they have for me. It's unnatural, or it's supposed to be – but I have the honor to be the unnatural daughter of unnatural parents. What do you expect?"

"I'm not sure you should be telling me this, Eugénie. I'm your friend, but there are things too intimate..."

"And who else should I tell them to, if not you, little fool?" Eugénie said, smiling with more warmth than was usual with her. Her dressing gown had slipped from her shoulders as she spoke, leaving her graceful, muscular arms bare. Her hair brushed against Louise's arm, and when she leaned towards Louise her breasts made a soft swell against the thin fabric of her chemise. Louise could not look away; then she tried to look anywhere else, at Eugénie's face, adorably flushed from her laughter, at her own hands laced together in front her, but her gaze drifted inevitably back to the shadow at Eugénie's neckline.

"Is everything all right, Louise? You aren't following the conversation very well."

"I think, that is, I'd better excuse myself. I'm very tired. I'm terribly sorry, Eugénie." Louise smiled weakly, getting to her feet.

Eugénie took her hand. "Sorry for what? It's been a big day for you, hasn't it, after those months shut up in the pension. You'll feel more yourself tomorrow, won't you?"

"I hope so. Oh, yes, Eugénie, I'm sure I will. Thank you, thank you, I couldn't have imagined – "

"Hush!" Eugénie cried. "I'll sulk if you try to thank me for just doing exactly what I liked and what would make me happiest."

"I'll go to bed then, Eugénie, and I won't be grateful to you at all."

"Yes, I suppose that will do," Eugénie said, peering at her with an expression of concentration and solicitousness that Louise did not recognize. "Well, kiss me goodnight, then."

And Louise kissed her cheek, quickly, and received in return a brief kiss on the lips, which sent her scurrying back to her own room after only the most perfunctory and incoherent goodnight, her cheeks flushed and her knees weak.

A storm went through her mind as she made her preparations for bed.

When the storm had passed she forced herself into calm and spoke sternly to herself: "There's nothing surprising in it. Nothing new has happened. You've known for a long time it wasn't Eugénie's friendship you wanted. It isn't for friendship's sake you have followed after her, made yourself agreeable to her, gone along with her schemes and shaken off your shock at her wild ideas..."

Succumbing again to emotion she went on, inwardly, "I want her to kiss me again... I want to know what it's like to touch all of her..." And her hand slid almost of its own accord under her chemise, gently squeezing her own breast; she wondered, the shame that had been gathering in the pit of her stomach dissipating at the brilliancy of the notion, how it would feel if it were Eugénie's hand touching her.

It was not shame but terror that attended her at long last to sleep: terror that the feelings she had at last admitted to herself should be visible for everyone to read in her face, terror that she had now either to announce her intention to leave, giving no explanation, which would hurt Eugénie, or to stay and stay silent at Eugénie's side, full of wild, guilty thoughts.

"Eugénie is an artist," she thought. "Eugénie has said that she would never love, never bind herself to another... The only passion she feels is for art and beauty. It would disappoint her, maybe disgust her, if she knew..."

The reader, observing Mlle Danglars's conduct with a more open and rational view, will perhaps have noticed some symptoms tending to contradict Mlle d'Armilly's understanding of the situation – but then, Louise could not be so impartial in her observations, and she stood to lose much by being overly sanguine.

**

Having judged it equally impossible to leave as it would have been to stay, Louise, waking from a heavy and restless sleep the next morning, chose to stay. This shows that she had hope, all the while pretending to herself that there could be none.

Strange as it may be to observe, from then on Louise found comfort in considering her newly discovered love. So long as she had tried to fit her feelings for Eugénie into the accepted model of young women's friendships, there had been as though a veil over her heart and her imagination. The veil had been torn away. She could smile to herself in private, letting happy and impossible visions of the future unfurl and fill her with tender longing.

Still, as the days passed, she tried to reason with herself. She tried to quell her trembling joy when she and Eugénie sat together at the piano, their legs touching and their curls falling on each other's necks. She tried not to follow Eugénie with her eyes whenever they were in the same room, not to notice the perfect ease and grace of every one of her gestures; tried to hide how her heart quailed every time Baroness Danglars spoke of Eugénie's engagement to Albert de Morcerf – Eugénie herself was perfectly indifferent to the subject, which rather than taking as permission to hope Louise saw as further evidence that a life of solitary creation was all Eugénie wanted, without desire for or interest in love.

It was interesting, this question of love – during that first storm of self-knowledge Louise had never said to herself, "I am in love with Eugénie." Instead she had gradually imbibed the idea, until from lingering in the background it had floated to the surface; it was understood: she was in love.

At the end of her first week in the house there came an afternoon when the baroness had gone out to call on her friends and the baron had shut himself into his cabinet. Eugénie called Louise to the music room.

"I've decided we should talk here," she said, gesturing for Louise to sit beside her on the piano bench where they had already spent so much of their time together, "so this room can have a soothing influence on you. For to tell you the truth, you've been behaving very oddly this past week. Don't you like it here, my dear one? Come, tell me what's the matter."

Louise felt her cheeks burning at these words. "The matter! No, nothing, Eugénie, I have nothing to complain of. You've been goodness itself."

"Careful, now. That sounds like a beginning of thanks, and I've told you I won't have it. Something is wrong, Louise. You talk less, you turn from me, you run away when I want to speak to you at bedtime – and you can't always be tired. Have I done something to upset you? Tell me, so I may correct myself."

"Nothing, nothing at all!" cried Louise, raising her hands to cover her face. "You've done nothing wrong, Eugénie, and I can't stand to hear you blaming yourself."

"There now, that's getting us ahead," Eugénie said. She took Louise's hands gently from her face and held them in her own strong hands. "Won't you tell me what it is? For if we are to be always together, there can't be some great upsetting secret between us – "

"But I can't tell you, Eugénie, I can't. You're an artist, you've said it again and again, your only passion is for art. It's no use to tell you, it would only make you disdain me. How many times have I heard you laugh at love stories and say with such confidence that you would never... would never love..." The wearying months of hopeless waiting, the strain of the past week, the fresh pain of this interview, all of it together became too much to bear. Louise began to cry. Through her tears she saw Eugénie's face going through a strange series of expressions: bewilderment, doubt, intense concentration, and at last a great clarity as though the secret of the universe had been revealed to her. Then the young artist smacked herself on the forehead and sighed impatiently.

"God help me, Louise, we've been a pair of perfect idiots!"

Louise stared at her, wiping the tears from her face. "What do you mean? How can you be an idiot, Eugénie, you, so clever, always so full of foresight?"

"And of artistic sensibilities, Louise, don't forget!" Eugénie cried eagerly. "Above all I want things to be beautiful always. Louise – my own Louise – " She reached out and took Louise's face between her two hands and brought their heads close together; Louise, still tearful, felt her breath coming in gasps. " – for you are, aren't you? My own Louise?"

Louise wrapped trembling arms around Eugénie's firm waist and whispered, "Yes. Yes, Eugénie, yours – if you are mine?"

Eugénie's answer was to kiss her, not the brief kiss of a friend but the sweet, slow kiss of a lover, one of her hands sliding to the back of Louise's neck. Louise gripped Eugénie's shoulders, too overcome with heat and emotion to do anything else, to think of anything else. Eugénie ended the kiss only to press her forehead to Louise's, both girls' quick breaths filling the small space between them.

"Does this mean," Louise gasped, "can this mean you love me?"

Eugénie slid from the seat down to her knees. She took Louise's hands and pressed kisses to her palms. "Yes, I love you, little fool," she murmured. "I thought you knew. I thought..."

It was so sweet, so achingly exciting to see Eugénie kneeling there at her feet, that Louise bent and, frightened of her own daring, found Eugénie's mouth to kiss again. Slowly she raised Eugénie to her feet and stood herself. They were almost the same height standing, Eugénie just enough taller that she put her fingers under Louise's chin to tilt her head up slightly.

Louise, too dazed with happiness to think clearly, tried to speak. "We should... We shouldn't, that is, not here, a servant will come, or the baroness will return, or... or..."

"Or?" Eugénie, laughing, held Louise at arm's length by her shoulders and looked her in the face. "I suppose you're right, but in truth no one ever notices what girls do together. Nobody cares."

"I suppose... Eugénie! You don't mean to say you've...?"

Eugénie smiled slyly. "Naturally I've made my experiments before. With schoolfellows, mostly – and once there was a statue of Minerva..."

"Oh! And the goddess didn't strike you down or turn you into something unnatural for your presumption!" Louise giggled and sank back down onto the piano bench, looking up invitingly until Eugénie joined her.

Laying her head on Louise's shoulder, Eugénie said, "I wouldn't think the goddess minds, my dear. And so – to try to keep some sense in this conversation – that's why you've been creeping and cringing? You thought you were one of Diana's nymphs who had woken up one morning and found herself harboring an Actaeon in her heart when she beheld her goddess?"

"Well..."

"As if Diana ever minded a look from one of her nymphs!"

"You think so?"

"Don't you?"

And they both laughed, giddy and flushed with the pleasure of discovery, and Louise could not repeat her cautious counsels when Eugénie kissed her again.

"But seriously, now, seriously, Eugénie," she began a little later, "how did you ever dare? The other girls?"

"Oh! That's easy enough. I was younger then, and when I was younger I followed the dictates of reason overzealously. I thought that you must first test a theory, dispassionately, if you are to be convinced."

"And so?"

"So I thought that I should like to kiss girls. It seems self-evident, doesn't it? Having made a few experiments I found I liked it well enough, but those others were only humoring me, or only doing it as a good joke. It wasn't what I really wanted."

"And what did you really want, Eugénie?"

"Ah, you know perfectly well, Louise. It was you I was waiting for."

"You'll turn my head... Still, you gave me no sign of it so long, I thought..."

"My artistic sensibilities, there! Truly it is a caution against taking fanaticism for anything so far that you let it drown out your own better sense. I knew when I first saw you, my dear... or, no, let's show things as they are, I knew very soon after we first spoke that you were the one – that if I were the goddess of the hunt I would need only one nymph to keep watch over my bow."

"Eugénie! Really!"

"But I didn't want to say anything. I was waiting for it all to happen of its own accord, as in a fairy tale or an opera... Isn't that absurd?"

"I think it's beautiful." Laughing, feeling for what may have been the first time in her life as free as air, Louise said, "Eugénie, I like that you could have thought something so absurd and beautiful. I don't mind that I've had to wait. I think – I think everything has happened just as it should, and if you tell me now that we'll always be together, even though I know I will be afraid as soon as I have ceased to be quite so happy, I'll believe you."

She looked into Eugénie's face, her eyes wide and shining.

"Always," Eugénie promised, solemnly kissing Louise's hand. "Always, so long as I have strength to fight."

"Won't you teach me to fight, too? I won't be a burden if I can help it."

"Well, I'll teach you if you insist, Louise, but I would rather fight alone for the both of us. Don't you believe I'm strong enough? Only wait until I meet a worthwhile challenge..."

Louise, for the first time, was troubled enough to fall from the heights of happiness, even as she had predicted. As strong as Eugénie was, she, Louise, knew more of real challenges that Eugénie, whose wealth and boldness combined had together crushed all obstacles that might have crowded her path.

"I believe you're strong enough for anything, Eugénie," she said, honestly, "but seriously, I hope you're strong enough to call on me when I can help."

Eugénie smiled and replied in a quiet, altered voice. "For some help, at least, I hope to call upon you very soon."

It was no answer to Louise's worry, but she could not dwell on it any longer. The promise of the future was too bright: the future many years from now, unraveling before her like Eugénie's night-black hair coming down for its coils and braids at the end of the day – and the future that was almost close enough to touch. When Eugénie called for her that night, she would go.


End file.
